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African Americans - German reconstruction and racial segregation

In 1945 the Allies claimed victory over a German state that had taken
racism to its logical extreme in the pursuit of eugenic purity and the
destruction of millions of lives. African-American troops were part of
the force that occupied Germany from 1945 to 1955, when efforts were
made on all fronts to reform its institutions and reconstruct it
physically. From the beginning of the occupation, U.S. racial practices
in the military contradicted the essence of its mission in Germany and
led to confusion and resentment among the conquered.

In the American zone of occupation, commanding officers could approve
soldiers' marriages as they saw fit. Many of those holding
conventional American ideas about race often prohibited mixed marriages
even when children were involved. When individual soldiers appealed
these prohibitions, military judges relied on the laws of the various
U.S. states to determine whether a proposed union could be approved and
compiled the relevant statutes for their own use. If a soldier resided
in a state where interracial marriages were illegal, his application to
marry outside his race would be turned down. Racial record keeping on
marriages began in 1947. German courts followed this example. The
Allies, having struck down the racist Nuremberg laws, oddly found
themselves reapplying them in the American zone of occupation, where the
German courts followed suit.

Military opposition to mixed marriages gradually declined, but in the
interim approximately three thousand biracial children were born in
Germany between 1945 and 1951, almost all the offspring of
African-American servicemen. As a result of the continuing ambivalence
among all parties about the children's prospects for adoption in
the United States, the West German state, autonomous in 1955, was
charged with the responsibility for absorbing them into German society.
Germans witnessed the contradictions between U.S. opposition to nazi
racism and policies governing intermarriage. The first cohort of
biracial children reached their teens as violence associated with
segregation in the United States made international headlines. While
some Germans continued to believe that homes in the United States should
be sought for those who were not already adopted, the prevailing opinion
was that the orphans should not be sent into a society characterized by
racial violence. If the United States' goal had been to transform
Germany into a democracy characterized by tolerance, the biracial
orphans provided them a paradoxical opportunity to show the world they
had shed Hitlerism.

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